This 'gentoo' teach a man to fish philosophy is flawed to the core. The man is starving, take em to mc donalds, get him a mc fish, give him a fishing pole, lures, a tackle box, and some fishing magazines. one day when you have no fish, and are starving, they may just get you back. the "read the manual" responses are a waste of breath, and time with out pointing to relevant manuals to read, or commands to execute to extract information from.

@666threesixes666, in the long run, spoon feeding Gentoo doesn't work very well. You might even be doing the people you're trying to help a disservice. That said, nobody's going to stop you if you want to, but you're not going to get any traction at all berating others for their refusal to do so. In fact, it's borderline trolling.

- John_________________I can confirm that I have received between 0 and 999 National Security Letters.

What will happen is, you'll get heartily sick of stupid people with the same old stupid questions, and constants requests for money to buy McShakes and burgers, which they then don't even want to share with you.

Unless you're Jesus, of course. Are you? Maybe the username is just to put people off the scent.

Linux philosophy is about forking or rewriting from scratch every piece of software without actually getting things done. I'm serious. Look at ifconfig for example - in BSD world you have a single ifconfig binary which allows to control almost every aspect of the network interface. I can even setup wifi+wpa connection using only ifconfig in OpenBSD. On the other hand in linux world we have almost abandoned ifconfig, fancy yet retarded iproute2, iwconfig, brconfig, wtfconfig, etc, and they all suck. I really hate this thing in linux people.

If handing out fish is your way of helping, nobody here will stand in your way. Most users come to Gentoo because they want to understand how something works. Thats best achieved by providing aids to understanding, which is not the same thing as providing a solution to the immediate problem.

Pointing to man pages saves quoting them in posts or writing them out again. man is just one of many useful references to spread understanding._________________Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

... this distro should focus on flexibility, choice, configurability, and maintainability. ease of use and instillation should be covered by maintainability

There are some mutually exclusive aims there. That means Gentoo has to make some compromises.
In my view, its about right. I freely accept that others have different opinions about what is a good compromise.

That explains why
a) there are so many Linux distros
b) gentoo is not for everyone

Feel free to make Gentoo into something its not (yet) ... open your own overlay, hack away there on top of the portage tree.
If you make your 666threesixes666 overlay public, you might even find others to join and reshape Gentoo.

You might even get the opportunity to add your ebuilds to the official portage tree.

@aCOSwt,

:)_________________Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

im not whining, im just explaining where im coming from, and why. people are coming at me with flawed doctrines that are self conflicting. i like the mc fish.... i like being able to remove tartar too if im in that kind of mood for the day. @ steveL there is an edit button so you could attack me too in the same post. i mean please do, ill try to respond in an epic evade. @ admins can you plz make a link for "stage3-arch-latest" for my wiki writings so i can have a link that does not move and need updating every time stage3 is changed plz.

why not jrg, there was a symlink to latest portage before it was migrated to emerge-webrsync... id like to be able to give a wget direct to drive being installed to instead of "download to ~/Downloads then move"

I just couldn't resist, really. Forum Admins don't control this. You can ping Release Engineering on IRC at #gentoo-releng (might be #gentoo-infra, but releng will send you in the right direction) and, if they're amenable, tell 'em you're going to open a bug with the request for formal tracking.

However, this may be a bad idea. One of the questions we sometimes ask while troubleshooting some installation issues is, "What exact tarball did you download?" If there's a "latest" symlink, then this interferes with troubleshooting as the Noob we're asking won't know. You might really, sincerely, want to consider teaching your Wiki readers to fish for the latest file.

- John_________________I can confirm that I have received between 0 and 999 National Security Letters.

kernel.org gave me a method to do "fetchlatestlinux" & wraps uname -a..... as in i suggest move "date stage3 packaged" to a file... specifically append to /etc/gentoo-release (where that information belongs)

ready for correct logic on that situation? portage has a critical design flaw where it can not track externally compiled packages, or user modifications to /etc configuration files. portage wants to revert back to "broken" and "inferior" default configs. even odd versions svn git etc give exact version number when invoked with --version. portage should be able to extract information and be more flexible and more powerful than it already is, and trace back flaws in builds to hand built packages if they are depended upon by something else thats breaking from "package.provided."

What's right with tarballs? Why do you call it package management while it isn't? If there is something managed, what's managed here exactly?

666threesixes666 wrote:

portage depends on it, why denote it as DANGEROUS, or INCORRECT?

Portage does a lot more, it manages it.

666threesixes666 wrote:

portage has a critical design flaw where it can not track externally compiled packages

How would it be able to do that? Why would it need to be able to do that? You just don't externally compile packages that result in a confusing system state.

666threesixes666 wrote:

, or user modifications to /etc configuration files.

Portage keeps track of modifications to config files with CONFIG_PROTECT, which /etc is a part of; that's why you need to run dispatch-conf or etc-update to merge the changes.

Furthermore, since everything has checksums, it even is aware to modifications made to the file it installs; try `qcheck ...` from app-portage/portage-utils

666threesixes666 wrote:

portage wants to revert back to "broken" and "inferior" default configs.

Nope, it is showing you the default config so you can merge any new changes from upstream.

666threesixes666 wrote:

even odd versions svn git etc give exact version number when invoked with --version.

Cool, but it's not always --version.

666threesixes666 wrote:

portage should be able to extract information

Feel free to write a program that does this for a LFS system with hundreds of packages; 1) not every program has a version parameter, 2) the parameter is not always the same, 3) the output is not always the same.

666threesixes666 wrote:

and be more flexible and more powerful than it already is, and trace back flaws in builds to hand built packages if they are depended upon by something else thats breaking from "package.provided."

Portage is flexible and powerful if you don't introduce inflexible matters like uncertainty or unpowerful matters like flaws in hand built packages.